Review: Clone Wars: Lightsaber Duels

Pros: The graphics are great, not just by Wii standards but in general, it really captures the look of the show.Â As a simple fighting game it’s a lot of fun, for a while at least.Â And it’s better than Masters of Teras Kasi.

Cons: It doesn’t have much depth, both in the amount of gameplay and in the controls.Â Most of all it will give you carpal tunnel syndrome.

Verdict: It should probably just be a rental, if only for medical reasons.

Grade: C+

This review was very difficult to write for two reasons.

First, didn’t want to write it until I found the rest of the game, and it turns out there is no rest of the game.Â It begins with a very helpful tutorial then lets you loose to do, basically, exactly what you just did in the tutorial.Â It never really develops from there other than in difficulty.

Generally I have no problem with this.Â In fact I’m a firm opponent of adding complexity to games simply for the sake of development.Â But when a fighting game has less depth or substance than Street Fighter II, which was released 17 years ago, there’s the nagging feeling that any minute now you’ll get the ability to do something else.

Second, the game gets painful to play.Â Literally, physically painful.Â The controls consist of swinging the Wii remote in the direction you want to swing your lightsaber; left, right, up or down.Â Not a subtle movement, no, but a somewhat forceful swing.Â At first this works fairly well, it’s intuitive and chaining together moves to make special combos is satisfying.

But then the fatigue starts to set in.

Then the battles get more frantic and it starts to hurt.

Enough time with Lightsaber Duels will either give you forearms like Popeye or carpal tunnel syndrome, or both.Â I pity the testers, locked away in their darkened QA area, forced to violently swing a controller around for 8 to 12 hours per day.Â I hope they have good disability benefits.Â But at least now they have firm handshakes.

That said I don’t hate it.Â It’s really not a terrible game in the short term, especially multiplayer.Â It’s definitely worth a rental.Â But after a week or so you’ll be ready to return it, both because you’ve seen all there is to see and because simply looking at the disc makes your forearms burn.